Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

The first in a series. Part 1 — Tones

There’s really nothing fair about growing up as a native English speaker. The world wants to learn your language, no credit to you. But you, personally, get to reap all the benefits. You are invited to go to exotic places like oh, say, Latvia after you graduate from college. In the village of Vandzene, amidst the rolling hills and plentiful lakes of the Talsi region of Kurzeme, you get to “teach” English, although you have no teaching skills in anything, least of all English. You’re treated like a visiting dignitary, with clandestinely expedited access to everything. They’ve also pulled strings to pay you at the highest end of local wages, ironic in that, despite being grossly unfair to long-suffering, hard-working local teachers, it’s not enough to pay off an hour’s worth of interest on your student loans.

And BEST OF ALL, when your Latvian language skills reach the level of a butane-huffing 13-year-old who just got his teeth knocked out in a fight, you are paraded before the local media and adulated in the manner of a minor deity.

Not to single out Vandzene, really. The same story gets played out in Beijing, albeit with Chinese characteristics.

Thus today we present: Zhonglish! Revenge for every native Mandarin speaker and, by extension, for every non-native speaker of English around the world who has been blankly stared at, mocked, ignored, ostracized, discounted, looked down upon, trifled with, or made a fool of as they attempted legitimate communication in English.

(For the record, “hellooooooo” thrown in the direction of aforeign face does not fall under the category of “legitimate communication”)

Oh yeah, the post also includes some reasonably constructive analysis of the “All right, I know I sound like a foreigner speaking Mandarin, but why?” problem.

Read the rest of this entry »

No, it’s not sex industry, just sexy běijīnghuà. Who’s responsible for the cheap headline tricks? Blame sexybeijing.tv…

Why had I never come across SexyBeijing.tv before last week?! The hostess, Anna Sophie Loewenberg aka Su Fei, is both forever-single and singular. Whether it’s her sundresses, pretty darned good běijīnghuà, or disarmingly candid questions and commentary — she has a knack for weaving personal questions into Mandarin banter and getting spontaneous responses from the kind of on-the-street types that you don’t usually get to hear from. Best of all for Beijing Sounds, she does most of her work in this capital city. Thus, through her interviews of in-the-hútòng Beijingers speaking thick běijīnghuà, we can get a sexy twist on the decidedly unsexy topic of intervocalic sibilant elision [yawn], which might be better stated as:

Beijingers sometimes drop the sh, zh and x in the middle of words/phrases.

You might think it’s not just unsexy, but even unworthy as a Beijing Sounds topic. After all, lotsa languages do a similar thing. My relatives from New Mexico tend to turn “doesn’t” into “dunt” or even “dun” depending on context (and the “dunt” is not the same as the “don’t” used for 3rd person in some English dialects — it really is just “doesn’t” minus the Z sound in the middle).

But in Beijing you can’t avoid the elision any more than you can avoid your neighbor’s buttocks on the #5 subway. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks, all, for the feedback this week. Between huffing virus-laden recirculated toxic fumes (aka flying) and battling a drooling-in-meetings case of jet lag, I’ve only had time for a few responses up until now.

It’s kind of shocking what happens to email/comment volume when well-trafficked blogs give you a plug. Special thanks to recently unmasked Jeremiah of the inimitable Granite Studio for mentioning Beijing Sounds. That mention was picked up by Jeremy of blogosphere stalwart Danwei, whose “Beijing-obsessed” line was spot on. So the feedback floodgates were opened, at least by Beijing Sounds standards.

I’m particularly smitten with two categories of comment that go to prove some people are even more obsessed with běijīnghuà than I am.

1. Deeper Thinking

To R or not to R? Apparently, some people have thought pretty hard about érhuàyīn 儿化音:

Sima wrote a treatise to get you started on the semantics of it all, with an especially good observation about fànguǎnr 饭馆儿 versus túshūguǎn 图书馆 — this is how linguistic meaning gets created. Elisa responded with another example, which my closest Beijinger informant tells me is not just běijīnghuà, but old-timer běijīnghuà at that. Then Brendan (of bokane.org fame) topped it off with a link to the best “bèir 倍儿” ever uttered in the history of cinema.

What do you call Mandarin butchered by non-native speakers?

I’d nominated then pleonastically defended “mandarish” but now I’m kicking myself for not thinking of Shaan’s approach of coining a Mandarin word for the task — it’s certainly a better parallel to “Chinglish”, which is fundamentally a combination of English syllables.

2. Corrections

I appreciate everyone who’s sent in a correction, by email or by comment. Apparently Beijing Sounds is a target-rich environment. My typesetter’s on notice that any more slacking will result in suspension without pay.

For the most part, I just make a note and correct the entry, but William had the observation that the mistake in this entry

一减一加五等于无

gives “the result of the calculation as 无 wu2 nothing instead of 五 wu3 five”. Amusing.

I happened to have lunch the other day with some university students, a couple of Guangdongers and a Shanghainese, in one of those Rolex-Louis Vuitton malls that clutter central Beijing, the kind where shopgirls outnumber customers 23 to 1 on gleaming floor after floor of luxury goods, until you get to the food court and find yourself breathing into your tablemate’s ear, close enough to eat the shrimp out of his chopsticks and surrounded by wàidìrén [外地人, outsiders, i.e. people from outside Beijing] shouting order numbers and bussing tables. Astoundingly, we found seats for the whole group, and as the conversation turned to language, (inevitable if you lunch with syz), I asked if they’d been trying to learn any běijīnghuà [北京话, Beijing dialect] while going to school here.

I was rewarded with looks of confusion. Yeah, of course they felt like their pǔtōnghuà [普通话, standard Mandarin] was improving. But were they actually learning běijīnghuà?! Of course not. All běijīnghuà really means anyway, they said, is that you have to juǎn shétou [卷舌头, curl your tongue] when you’re speaking pǔtōnghuà.

This is typical. Non-Beijingers describe the pronunciation of the natives as tongue-twisting, and it’s pretty literally right. The Beijing retroflex is somewhat like the American Midwest R as in “car”; it gets tacked onto and into words and certainly isn’t suited to everyone’s second language tongue. (Listen to this post for some good examples)

The general perception among outsiders is that it’s just a way of speaking. It doesn’t really mean anything. HOWEVER, my two experts for today’s post, one six and one sixty-ish, say it ain’t so. There are words you can say with or without the Beijing-R (commonly called érhuàyīn 儿化音 or érhuàyùn 儿化韵), but often the different pronunciations really mean something different.

As a bonus, in one of the examples today, tāngr 汤儿, the Beijing-R fuses with an /ng/, turning it into a truly sublime consonant. Even the spelling /ngr/ doesn’t quite do it justice, because the /r/ is so thoroughly mixed in with the /ng/ that it really becomes it’s own special sound. When Dr. Seuss talked about the letters after Z, I’m sure this is what he had in mind. In fact: I’ll isolate it just so you can hear the two right next to each other, first tāng then tāngr:

But back to our story. The érhuàyīn 儿化音 really does change things. In the first example it’s an actual difference in meaning: tāng 汤 and tāngr 汤儿 simply refer to two different liquids. The former means broth/soup, while the latter is the liquid that comes with your non-soup dishes, something cooked out of the meat or vegetables that you might spoon onto your rice. Sauce / gravy, perhaps, but incidental — not consciously made for the purpose of being sauce by itself.

In the second example Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes the holidays bring unplanned entertainment — the best kind. Uncle Fred and Aunt Helen re-gifting to your sister-in-law the Christmas ornament she’d so lovingly handmade them three years ago. Your father and father-in-law exchanging giftcards of the same amount to the same store.But who would have thought that a holiday season show in Beijing could give us material to rival… well, let’s set the stage:

FIRE CHIEF [moving towards the door, then stopping]: Speaking of that–the bald soprano? [General silence, embarrassment.]

MRS. SMITH: She always wears her hair in the same style.

FIRE CHIEF: Ah! Then goodbye, ladies and gentlemen.

MR. MARTIN: Good luck, and a good fire!

FIRE CHIEF: Let’s hope so. For everybody.

– “The Bald Soprano” by Eugène Ionesco

Ionesco died not so long ago, 1994, without so much as a peep about what he thought of the Chinese “national event” TV special. You wonder if he would have found new material in it. Or maybe he just would have felt upstaged. After all, his own theater of the absurd, despite its so-called success, never attracted more than a handful of clove-smoking, Sartre-reading, co-ed-leching Dadaist professors.

CCTV, on the other hand, counts an audience in the millions even on the fourth rerun of “Mr. Wang pushes his cart to market,” let alone on an evening variety show the night before Christmas, which if I remember correctly is when the following clip is from: Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: Newer, sexier blogroll can be found here

Q: Why have a blogroll?